Palestinians forcibly removed from land
This is information everyone should be aware of as they assess the tragedy unfolding in Gaza.
The Israeli settlements that Hamas attacked on October 7 were built on the ruins of 11 Palestinian villages.
Those villages were destroyed by Zionist militia in the 1948 Nakba, an ethnic cleansing operation that forcibly removed 700,000 Palestinians from 400 towns and villages.
Imagine being a descendant of those forced removals.
The residents of those villages were driven into a refugee camp called the Gaza Strip.
It was created by Israel after Egypt refused to take Palestinian refugees after the Nakba.
Just the other side of the Gaza Strip concentration camp fence that traps you into one of the most densely populated and heavily controlled (by Israel) areas in the world, you see Zionist settlers occupying the very land of your parents and many generations of your family before them.
Tragically, since Israel’s illegal birth in 1948, after its illegitimate conception with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, whereby Britain undertook to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish state in Arab Palestine, the area has known only oppression for the Palestinian people. It is far worse than apartheid, which itself was recognised globally as a crime against humanity.
In Palestine-Israel we are seeing a form of unrelenting torture. It is only the severity of that physical and mental persecution that varies.
The most viable solution is a process of negotiations between all parties like we had at the Conference for a Democratic SA in the early 1990s.
A Truth Commission will have to hear evidence on the past century of Zionist oppression of Palestinians.
Israel and its funder, the US, will have to pay substantial reparations to descendants of dispossessed Palestinians
and land restitution will need to be effected.
It is time to end the failed Zionist Israel project.
It has created a US colony of privilege built on the dispossession and suppression of the indigenous Palestinian people.
What is required is not the destruction of Israel, but a coming together of all the people of the area to create a unitary, nonsectarian state.
Off the Gaza coast is a rich natural gas field from which all Palestinian-Israelis could benefit as just one dividend of a peaceful settlement to a crisis that has lasted over a century.